The design of gas turbine airfoils is the subject of continuous improvement, since design directly impacts cooling efficiency. In some gas turbine designs, the turbine airfoil chord is long relative to the airfoil length, resulting in a “short” & “fat” airfoil. Traditional serpentine cooling passages need either to have increased number of turns to account for the additional area to cool, which results in increased pressure losses, or the individual passages must simply be wider, which leads to “dead” zones in which air tends to stagnate undesirably, thereby reducing cooling efficiency. Therefore, there continues to be a need for improved cooling for internally cooled gas turbine airfoils.